[Post COVID Innovations] What are successful Businesses doing differently?

With COVID becoming the new normal, local businesses have struggled to keep pace with the changing times, and technology has come to the rescue with new strategies. Let's look at how businesses are tackling this post-COVID reality. Three simple things are separating the winners from the rest.

Acknowledging the new normal

COVID-19 forced drastic changes in how consumers buy, and businesses that cannot keep pace with these changes are running heavy losses or shutting down entirely.

Many restaurants started with deep discounts, but the winners acknowledged the new normal by focusing on easy online ordering, pickup and delivery options, food safety, and sanitization. Some approaches that worked were delivering fresh fruits, vegetables, and express groceries.

Grocery outlets also adopted curb-side pickup models, where you order your items online, drive in to the store parking lot, and get a contactless delivery straight to your car.

Restaurants like Guerilla Tacos added essential goods to their food orders. You could buy toilet paper and eggs alongside taco ingredients in their Emergency Taco Kits.

Understanding changing customers

With COVID, customer needs, preferences, and buying patterns changed. Businesses that tapped into this changing pulse stayed profitable.

Restaurants began offering meals like buy one hot meal and get one cold meal for tomorrow, family meals designed with built-in leftovers, and date night meals that include a half-price bottle of wine.

One story turning heads is Brinker, one of the world's leading casual dining companies, which owns brands like Chili's and Maggiano's Little Italy. Brinker launched a separate, delivery-only brand called It's Just Wings.

Embracing technology

With offline revenue shrinking, more restaurants increased their reliance on online food delivery from DoorDash, Uber Eats, and the like. The winners, however, adopted technology to optimize their kitchen space and even share their safety routines with customers. Here is how.

Optimizing kitchen space

We all know about virtual kitchens, or ghost kitchens. What if you could use your extra restaurant capacity, or even reopen your restaurant, by cooking food for top brands like a virtual kitchen?

Restaurants are now partnering with companies like Local Culinary, which holds licenses to sell specific menu items from large restaurant brands such as Yoko Bowl.

Now you can use your kitchen space and labor for extra online orders coming from your partner brands. Local Culinary, for example, provides dedicated training to help your team cook replica dishes that are most popular for those partner brands. Diners in your neighborhood find dishes from their favorite brands through DoorDash and the like, delivered straight from your kitchen.

Winning back customer trust

If you run a restaurant seriously, your COVID checklist is a top priority. What if your customers could see all the OSHA, CDC, and WHO guidelines you follow, right when they walk in?

Restaurants, cafes, pubs, bars, salons, spas, and even hotels are now using products like Delightree to show how well they are following COVID safety tasks on tablets and screens in their reception areas, giving customers data-driven confidence in their safety.

Hope you had a fun read. If you have an interesting story to share with other business owners, book a demo and tell us about it.